When comparing nvALT vs Kobito, the Slant community recommends nvALT for most people. In the question“What is the best Markdown editor for OS X?”nvALT is ranked 12th while Kobito is ranked 31st. The most important reason people chose nvALT is:

nvALT has a simple text box at the top (similar to that of a web browser) and when you start typing inside it, nvALT immediately displays a drop-down box of all the notes that contain the text you are searching for. The more you type, the more the search is narrowed down.

Pros

Pro

Powerful search syntax

nvALT has a simple text box at the top (similar to that of a web browser) and when you start typing inside it, nvALT immediately displays a drop-down box of all the notes that contain the text you are searching for. The more you type, the more the search is narrowed down.

Pro

Free

Pro

Lightweight

Pro

MultiMarkdown 3 support

Has built-in support for MultiMarkdown 3.

Pro

Powerful note-taking features

nvALT is not only used for simple text editing but also as a powerful tool for taking notes, TODOs, phone numbers and every other piece of information that can be stored in a plain-text file.

This is because nvALT is not designed only as a tool to write text, but also as a powerful search and organize tool for plain-text files.

Pro

Right to Left support

Pro

Direct post to Qiita

Files can be easily posted to and synchronized with Qiita, the largest Japanese community site for geeks.

Cons

Con

Not very powerful as far as text editing goes

nvALT's strength is its search feature. It has some basic text-editing features such as cut, paste, find-and-replace and so on. But it doesn't have any advanced text manipulation features available in other editors.

Con

There are some issues with the English translation

Kobito is an application which was originally developed in Japanese and later translated to English. The English translation is not perfect though.